It was on emerging from a ten-year immersion Dans la langue de personne (In No One’s Language)1, that of the Yiddish poets who spoke the annihilation, haunted by their voices to which I had tried to join my own in a perilous exercise of outside-inside — dialogue and translation — that the idea of their absence in a review on “literature and Jewishness today” appeared to me inconceivable.
First of all because their voices seek to pierce the world’s deafness. And because it is impossible not to hear this cry and still less this silence that wells up within us, in the knowledge or the absence of that language. “I write in an absence,” says Henri Raczymow, “the loss of my prehistoric language, Yiddish.”2 Its grip — “…the heaviness of the hand that immobilizes, (…) this weight of frozen time (that) will not lift…”3 — is precisely that something that speaks within us, that we do not necessarily understand and that nonetheless demands revelation and incarnation.
Cynthia Ozick, among American writers, is today the most sensitive water-diviner of this buried speech. One of the metaphors she has chosen to capture it is that of the “untraceable translator” in Envy; or, Yiddish in America.
“Metaphor,” she writes, “is… a priest of interpretation: but what it interprets is memory. Metaphor is under the obligation to dig tirelessly into language and narration; it inhabits language in what it has of the most concrete. As the most traumatic projection of the unknown into our most intimate, most sensitive, most secret being…”4
The link she thus establishes between metaphor and memory can only be understood if one associates into a single whole the different registers of memory: “memory of what never was: fantasy; memory of what was: truth; memory of what one could not receive: reality.”5
A non-place: America
Envy; or, Yiddish in America (“Le traducteur introuvable” [The Untraceable Translator]6) by Cynthia Ozick unfolds according to the mechanisms of dream or rather of nightmare, with an implacable logic and an appearance of chaos. The places file past and fuse together, the episodes nest within one another, the characters are ubiquitous, past and present overlap, the points of view ceaselessly shift, abolishing perspective and center of gravity, dispersing the focal points throughout the body of the narration; the stream of consciousness is interrupted and resumed according to random rhythms, dialogue and monologue mutate into one another; the narrator’s voice covers its tracks by a total and deliberate ambiguity, situating itself always at the borders between irony, sarcasm, empathy and rejection, love and hatred, invective and lamentation; genre scenes, real or imaginary epistolary exchanges between the living, between the living and the dead, theatrical scenes and lines, tales and poems, inserted into the body of the story, carry out a mise en abyme that makes one’s head spin.
For these Jews of the yiddishland shipwrecked on the shores of Manhattan, some for forty years, America is the world of the unreal. Daily life — diurnal life — drowns in the grotesque and the macabre. They are tossed about there — dead leaves, wrecks come from another universe — by subways and trains that go from the Bronx to Brooklyn. Condemned to the new, to the tawdry, to the sham, to the artificial, to the rigged, to the lie of an America that flaunts its overabundance of synagogues like its plethora of food, strangers to its temples as to its tables:
…inside, enormous imitation-bronze Tablets of the Law, the motorized rotation of mobiles representing outstretched hands, giant tetragrams of transparent plastic hung from the ceiling like chandeliers, galleries, altars, platforms, pulpits, aisles, pews, chests of waxed oak containing prayer books printed in English with prayers of recent manufacture. Everything smelled of damp plaster. Everything was new. A collation was spread out on long luminous tables — cakes glazed with icing, snowy mounds of egg salad, herring, salmon, tuna, stuffed carp, lakes of sour cream, electric coffeepots of silvered metal, bowls of lemon slices, pyramids of sliced bread, cups of transparent Black Forest porcelain, Indian copper trays on which baked cheeses were stacked, gilded bottles lined up like ninepins, great pats of butter sculpted in the shape of birds, a Hansel-and-Gretel cottage of cream cheese and cake… One day… he read words of Scripture riveted to the wall in molds of fourteen-carat gold: “Thou shalt see me from behind, but my face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33:34) (69-70).
The nocturnal streets are phantasmagorias, where the snow itself has nothing in common with that, enveloping and protective, of the Old World, bound in memory to the warmth of the fire and to the chanted rhythm of prayers. Here, it is a source of blindness, of bewilderment, of suffering:
“A veil of snow whirled before him and made him spin around on himself. He stumbled into a snowdrift, a superb bluish mass raised on a slant. His feet were soaked, pierced as if by a wave of frozen blood… His shoes were hells of cold, his toes dead blocks. Himself the only living creature in the street, not even a cat. The veil of snow came and stuck to him, whirled and struck his pupils…” (116-117).
The night of the city is inhabited by strange visions, by “cars crouching under heaps of snow, blue-backed turtles” (117), and the dawn is crossed by yellow elephants with “a little eternal light… on (the)ir trunk” (122).
An America from which America is absent, a desert without men, save for the doorman glimpsed going about his task or a Puerto Rican boy whose red cheeks call up a childhood memory in Kiev, a telephone booth with a little sign proclaiming “we are all human brothers but some humans ought to drop dead, all right?” (132) and a voice at the other end of the line which, in a southern twang, after having preached the good word, concludes, addressing its Jewish interlocutor:
“All the people who come into contact with you become your enemies… Even your eating habits are abnormal, they go against the grain of daily pleasures. You refuse to seethe the lamb in its mother’s milk. You will not eat a fertilized egg because it has a spot of blood. You chant while washing your hands. You pray in a foul jargon and not in the beautiful sacred English of our Holy Bible.
— Amalekite! Titus! Nazi! The whole world is infected by you, the antisemites” (152).
Boundless cruelty of the omniscient narrator who reports this discourse and who, by his ironic distance, his macabre drollery and by the kernel of truth thus laid bare, assassinates through derision both the speaker of the words and his addressee.
America — world of the undifferentiated, on which float islets where a few Yiddish intellectuals have washed up. Their destiny: to live on the margins, on the fringes of a world that is coming undone, that has no consistency.
Edelshtein, without hearth or known abode for the reader, “without children, possessing only a few distant relatives,” always perceives himself as in-between: trains, streets; in transit: an invited lecturer, never welcome, of synagogues, temples, cultural centers — or a refugee for an hour, a day, a night with other castoffs.
The apartments, plunged in murky lights, are sordid, gnawed by death: that of the Braumzweigs, “filthy mirrors, crystal overtaken by rust, always on the verge of cracking, an exhausted corridor, abandoned…” (70-72); worse still, the single room of Vorovsky, neither dwelling nor office, where books and magazines never read, never distributed, pile up:
It was a single room, the sink and the stove behind a plastic curtain, shelves bending not under the weight of books, but of stacks of magazines, a sticky table, a sofa bed, a desk, six kitchen chairs and, along the walls, seventy-five cartons containing two thousand copies of Vorovsky’s dictionary.
Specters in Manhattan
Who are these beings who move about in a world akin to the trash cans from which Beckett’s characters emerge?
They organize themselves into two ensembles, two irreconcilable universes that clash. On the side of life, of this artificial America, of adulterated knowledge — imposture and sham — the young:
…the lanky young men laden with books…, carrying them almost like clothes, costumes of a clamorous bookishness, of a clamorous sexuality, with trousers molding the crotch, drawing buttocks in the air, mustachioed, some hairy down to the collarbone, legs and calves menacing like hammers, and young girls, tunics, knees, trousers, boots, cute little things, little hidden tongues, black eyes” (89).
At the center, the figure of the Yiddish writer, Ostrover, the one who, thanks to his translations, has conquered America, constitutes the magnet around which all the passions unleash themselves — the admiration of his young readers, the hatred and envy of his colleagues and contemporaries. The sole Yiddish author — genius of modernity or master of cynicism? — to be read and recognized by the whole world. Catalyst of emotions, of ardors and outbursts, revealer of souls in their most secret and darkest folds, he sets in motion, by his mere existence, the constellation of the other characters.
Alongside the young whom he seems to fascinate, and whose questions show the unbridgeable abyss of incomprehension that separates them, he draws to himself, as the flame draws the night moth, his brothers in writing, whom he destroys and corrupts in the manner of the devils and spirits that people his tales. His fellows who gravitate around him and to whom one of Ostrover’s admirers flings:
— Die… Die right now, you old ones, what are you waiting for?… the whole gang, parasites, hurry up and die. (148)
Is it even useful, moreover, to express the wish? Are these old men not specters who haunt America — their dead planet? “Lives had passed through (them) then gone away” (70).
The Braumzweigs — the wife “gray gaze, slack gestures” (70), the husband who “had a good position, a sinecure, a camouflaged annuity” assured by an association whose founder, a manufacturer of laxatives, and all the members — were dead.
Chaim Vorovsky, the alcoholic lexicographer, decked out in a hat, “a great Russian-style fur monster. He saw it haloed with sleigh bells, with shrouds of snow.” (99)
“Here, we are all ghosts” (107), says Edelshtein, a widower in New York, sixty-seven years old, (a Yiddishist as they used to say), poet” (66), the central consciousness of the story. The Yiddish poets are ghosts. “The first poet was a beggar living on institutional charity — Braumzweig; the second, Silverman, sold elastic stockings for women, varicose-vein stockings… Braumzweig, scratching himself in his bed, also a ghost. Silverman long dead” and Edelshtein, a specter who haunts the streets of Manhattan, knowing himself too to be long dead, “Impossible… that you should still be alive,” young Hannah says to him (106). “We are already dead,” Edelshtein observes (103).
Language and death
“In the beginning was the word,” source of life and creation. Here the proposition is inverted. The languages league together against the specters of Manhattan, each one the battlefield on which the languages of Edom contend, some lost, others that slip away, that taunt and humiliate them, never letting themselves be approached or tamed, settling in the mouth or under the pen as inert dough, with a taste of gall or of ashes. The Jewish languages — Hebrew of the abandoned, forsaken, deceptive and sacrilegious prayers; Yiddish, useless, ignored, reduced in America to a few ill-digested and ill-spelled gurglings of childhood, to a few obscenities of local color. Each of these specters — his own Tower of Babel, doomed to ruin — disjoints, dislocates, implodes into silence.
English, spoken with an accent that makes the young laugh, never mastered, never adequate, fleeting, betraying thought, language of impotence — enemy and coveted language, the only one capable of bringing the poet out, or so at least he thinks, of his prison — the key to the world. It remains inaccessible, an obsession of every instant that launches him in quest of the “untraceable translator.”
A language that rises like a wall between the generations. The parents “incapable of imagining the lives of their children. Nor the children that of the parents. The parents were too disarmed to explain themselves, the sons too impatient… Mutenesses, mutations.” (71)
Vorovsky had left Vilna for the German universities, Berlin, in 1924. He had devoted his life “to the compilation of a history of the human spirit, expressed in mathematics… Mathematics, the definitive poetry, the only possible one” (101), in the form of a bilingual German-English dictionary, which had cost him seventeen years of his life and whose useless copies piled up in his room. At the end of this labor, “he had suddenly burst out laughing and had continued laughing for six months, even in his sleep… His wife died, then his father, and he continued to laugh. He lost control of his bladder, then discovered, to cure the laughter, the therapeutic virtues of drink.” (99)
English, German, mathematics — languages and chaos, languages and madness.
The little Russian ever known by Edelshtein, buried in the mass grave with Avremeleh, by his false name Alexei Y. Kirilov, now probably “a little corpse of Babi Yar” (124), once the secret love of his childhood, “that shining face: the face of the flame” (124) that springs up from every object and at every moment on the road of the aged poet. Destiny of this child, promised by Russian, by “his German toys and his Latin,” to escape the ghetto, to reach the “vast world outside” (116) and who, falling “from the edge of the ravine,” falling “into (h)is grave… was falling for the first time into reality.” (146).
This reality, that of Edelshtein: “I have no other dwelling than the prison, history is my prison, the ravine my dwelling” (146) — prison and ravine, this Yiddish language that inhabits him and from which he cannot escape.
No other language in the world had known this destiny:
And the language was lost, murdered. The language — a museum. Of what other language could one say that it was dead, of sudden and incontestable death, in the course of a given decade, on a given patch of earth?.. Yiddish, that tiny thing, that little light — oh! holy little light — dead, gone. Dispatched into the darkness. (67)
No place, nowhere on the globe — the hole, the bottom of the earth — in dr’erd — in the strict sense of the term.
A language too many, superfluous, unwelcome, improper in New York. Object of contempt, of a vague shame. Irony and derision: it is from the death of this language that Edelshtein materially lives. He goes to lament the fate of Yiddish, in well-off suburbs, before indifferent, sometimes mocking audiences, who give themselves a clear conscience by hiring themselves a hired mourner who performs for them the rites of death and also serves them as a badkhen [wedding jester] by defusing the situation with stupid and hackneyed jokes that debase him and make no one laugh.
No more of a place for this language in Israel:
In Tel Aviv or in Jerusalem, Yiddish was not held in honor. In the Negev, it was not worth a hill of beans. In the State of Israel, that gift of God, the people did not want the language that had occupied the short interval, the bad patch, between the land of Canaan and the present. Yiddish was inhabited by the past, rejected by the new Jews. (75)
To live in Yiddish is to live in hell. The hell of madness. This language drives one mad. Schizophrenia of the famous writer, Ostrover, obliged to assume the masks his admirers impose on him: “The puppet on the ventriloquist’s knees. A dummy. It is another’s language and he exhibits this dead doll” (127). Madness of Vorovsky, saved neither by English, nor by German, nor by mathematics, proud of the few scraps of Yiddish preserved by his niece Hannah and condemned to laugh without end and to piss on himself while laughing. Madness of Braumzweig, who mutilates himself by tearing off pieces of flesh, the scabs that cover his skin.
Madness of Edelshtein’s monologues with his past and his present — both dead; with his ghosts — his dead father, the dead Alexei Kirilov — with himself dead of solitude, of self-pity, of false rhetoric, of truth that has no currency, finding no burrow, not even Vorovsky’s fur hat in which to take refuge, a little rodent furnished with a few seeds.
Between him and the world a transparent and impassable pane of glass: impossible communication with his friends, all shut up like him in this glass cage of a dead culture in which, like the monsters of Wedekind’s menagerie, the dying devour one another, lashed with guilt:
in the diaspora, the birth of a Jew increases no population, the death of a Jew is devoid of meaning. Anonymous. To be dead among the martyrs, at least a solidarity, an entry into history, a belonging to the marked beings, kiddush-hashem [the sanctification of the Name, martyrdom]. (118)
But he is expelled from history, both the bygone and the one to come. For young Hannah, suffering “is superfluous” and “history is a waste” (140) and the world has no place for these castoffs, abandoned on the wayside, in their “ghettos”: “a graduate of the University of Berlin in 1924, Vorovsky stinks of the ghetto? Me, four books by the grace of God… I stink of the ghetto? And God, four thousand years he’s been keeping company with Jews since Abraham, God too, he stinks of the ghetto?” (144)
Hell of a deaf world where neither his God nor Edelshtein can be heard. Edelshtein’s four books, not a single human being knows them, shut up in their prison, their ravine — Yiddish. Without subscribers and without readers, the obscure review Bitterer yam [Bitter Sea] that welcomes Edelshtein’s poems and of which Braumzweig is the editor, is nicknamed by the latter’s wife Invisible Ink. The unread, useless copies clutter their shabby apartment.
The world’s deafness condemns them to muteness.
Ladies, gentlemen, they have excised my vocal cords, the only language in which I can speak to you freely and fluently, my beloved mameloshen [mother tongue]; scalpels, deaths, the operation was a great success… If my language holds no secrets for you, ladies, gentlemen, it is because you are ghosts, ectoplasms, specters. I invented you, you are the fruit of my imagination, there is no one here, a deserted cavern, an empty valve, abandonment, desolation (90).
Deprived of speech, deprived of an interlocutor, shut up in the death of a dead language, they are doomed to oblivion, that is to say to non-being, to nothingness.
The Talmud says that to save a single life is like saving the whole world. And if one saves a language? Worlds, perhaps. Galaxies. The whole universe. (127)
For the loss of a language is an absolute disaster; men engender other men, the generations succeed the generations, but the effacement of a language is irremediable.
“The Task of the Translator”
What is at play from then on in translation is a matter of life or death, of life and death, for the author as for the translator.
To come out of deafness, to come out of muteness, to come out of oblivion, to come out of non-being, to come out of nothingness. Not to accede to glory, but to attain/to touch (to reach), as Edelshtein says, to be in the world, to be of the world, to have a voice, a speech, vocal cords.
The denial the world opposes to him is absolute. The languages of the nations keep mastery of their destiny, free to speak, to create, to translate and to be translated. Yiddish, “lost language, murdered language,” is reified. Others decide upon its ashes. They grant speech according to their own decree. Ostrover, the sole elect of an entire literature — a screen for all the others, an alibi for the world. Hence the frenzy, the madness, the delirium, the “envy,” the “jealousy” of an Edelshtein whose universe has toppled, whose reason founders, a pitiful King Lear of an abolished kingdom. The quest for the translator becomes the quest for life itself.
Envy; or, Yiddish in America is a meditation, grave and ironic, raging and anguished, on translation in general and on the translation of Yiddish in particular, by someone who has had the painful experience of it.
First of all a meditation on the art of translation. In her A Translator’s Monolog, Cynthia Ozick writes, “…the relation of the poem to its translation is not that of an object to its shadow…”;7 it is neither resemblance, nor reflection, nor unveiling of a pre-existing given; translation comes about in the process of translating (craft becomes becoming).8
While refusing Edelshtein’s poems, thus casting him, his language and his poems, into the limbo of the not-come-to-be, the translator attributes to herself the modernity of Ostrover’s tales: “Who has read James Joyce, Ostrover or me?” (87) She defines her art as that of makeup:
…I am a cosmetician, a painter, the one they pay, those people, in the funeral parlors to do the same work on the corpses. I tell you that Yiddish has no importance. Neither his Yiddish, nor anyone’s. Everything that is Yiddish has no importance” (87).
But for the poet who has “swallowed his language” and is suffocating from it, Yiddish is primordial and essential. In the imaginary translation lesson that Edelshtein gives to his translator, also imaginary, Hannah, he explains to her:
…please, do not forget that when a goy from Columbus, Ohio, says: “Elijah, the prophet,” he is not speaking of Eliohou hanovi. Eliohou is one of ours, a Folksmentch [man of the people] who walks about in secondhand clothes. Their Elijah is God knows what. The same biblical figure, with precisely the same story, once he takes on a name from the Bible in the English version, BECOMES ANOTHER. Life, hope, tragedy, nothing is the same. They speak of the lands of the Bible, for us it is eretz yisroel.9
But Hannah, who had received this language as her portion, refuses the stigmata of death that grip it. She struggles to preserve her life: “…you devour people with your disgusting old age — cannibals, that’s what you are.” (148) She refuses to let herself be “vampirized,” to be “between two organisms. A cultural hermaphrodite, neither one nor the other” (87).
The alcoholic, mad and polyglot mathematician states the art of translation in negative predicates:
Translation is not equation. If you are looking for an equation, you had better die right now. There is no equation, equations do not occur. It is an idea like a two-headed animal, you follow me? The last time I saw an equation, it was a photo of myself. I looked into my own eyes and what did I see? I saw God in the form of a murderer. (101)
And what is the image under which the translator of Yiddish, this “untraceable translator,” sees himself? The problems of poetics present themselves to him as to the translator of any other language. But unlike the others, he sees himself compelled to answer this injunction stated by Glatstein: “be our sepulcher.”10
However, if he wishes to escape the deadly grip of this imperative, he must make himself a ferryman, here again like every translator. But from which shore to which shore must the translator of Yiddish pass indefinitely? With this feeling of guilt at being a carrion-bearer, at nourishing his writing and his language with the effaced language, with this burden of choosing who shall live and who shall die, of having, as it were, the power of life and death over works which, without him, risk being engulfed in the nothingness of oblivion.
If he does not suffocate beneath the overflow of voices that cry out or hollow out the silence within him, if he rejects this God who murders men and languages, it is because he believes, like Walter Benjamin, that there exists “…a very intimate relation among languages… that of an original convergence. It consists in this, that languages are not foreign to one another, but a priori and abstraction made of all historical relations, are related to one another…”11
This faith does not abolish the mourning of the effaced language, for it is irreplaceable; it leaves a gaping void that will never be filled in that entangled and inextricable weave that is human languages. Yet translation sows those “seeds” of which Benjamin speaks, or scatters those “sparks” of which the Kabbalah speaks; it makes an echo, a meaning resonate — a tikkun [repair, restoration] — gives to the one that has vanished an incarnation in other languages.
“…it is to translation, which draws its flame from the eternal survival of works and from the unending rebirth of languages, that it falls to put always anew to the test this holy growth of languages, in order to know how far from revelation lies the mystery they conceal, how present this growth may become in the knowledge of that distance.”12
“Foreign Mother-Tongue”
If “what gives content to his work (that of the translator) is the great motif of the integration of several languages to form one true language,”13 the writer’s aim seems to be that incandescent kernel of “pure language,” that original tongue that is at the birth of all speech and that must be gathered at the root of silence, without precondition. Jewish writing after the annihilation, whatever its language of expression, cannot but encounter the silence of Yiddish.
My silence will be that of this language, of Yiddish: thus I name my silent language. Not having entered into it, it would be it that had come to lodge in me, such as it remains for me, a voice of silence that does not cease to speak within me…14
Once a language of election, chosen by multilingual writers in place of Hebrew, Russian, or Polish as language of writing, an allegiance renewed in deliberate and voluntarist fashion by several generations in succession, it has become for many a language of the forbidden, of the impossible appropriation or reappropriation. Once a profane language, the language of the people, its annihilation has made it taboo. Yiddish today inverts the paradigm of election. In a certain way it is now it that elects its bearers, in an act of possession underground, clandestine, which does not bring it back to life, condemns it to remain in suspense “between two worlds.”15
Today (and this was of course not the case when Yiddish was spoken and written by millions of people), this language has taken, in the topography of the psyche, a place at once foundational and matricial. A blind spot, unknown, inaccessible, present-absent, lacunary, surging up sometimes in fragments, in flashes, in scraps. It is to language what the unconscious is to the psyche.
On the threshold of silence, in this coming-and-going between the relinquishment of the mother tongue and the elaboration of that other language that is all writing, in this “foreign mother-tongue,”16 what role does Yiddish hold for Jewish writers today?
“Silence is the language of the dead entered into me, a silence that it hollows out deep, with which it surrounds me and that says we.”17
In Jewish writing today, the death one bears within oneself, one’s own and that of the exterminated — for that is what writing is today, the living seized by the dead — always speaks with a double voice: into all languages is mingled the dybbuk of the absent one.
Notes
Paris, Le Seuil, 1993, Collection Librairie du XXe siècle, directed by Maurice Olender.↩︎
Henri Raczymow, reply to a survey of the Quinzaine littéraire on French writers today, no. 532, May 16, 1989. I believe this is the case for a number of Jewish writers in the United States, cf. R. Ertel, Le roman juif américain (The American Jewish Novel), Paris, Payot, 1980. Among the French-language writers, I think, among others, of André Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz, Georges Perec, Henri Raczymow, Serge Koster, Myriam Anissimov, Gérard Wajcman, Berthe Burko, Robert Bober, Régine Robin, of dramatists like Jean-Claude Grumberg, of poets like Charles Dobzynski, Céline Zins, Alain Veinstein…↩︎
François Gantheret, “De l’emprise à la pulsion d’emprise,” in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, Paris, Gallimard, Spring 1977.↩︎
Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 282.↩︎
François Gantheret, “De l’emprise à la pulsion d’emprise,” op. cit., p. 81.↩︎
For the analysis of this story, I have used, besides the original version of the text, the French edition, “Le traducteur introuvable ou le yiddish en Amérique,” in Le Rabbi païen (The Pagan Rabbi), trans. Claudia Ancelot, Paris, Payot, 1988. All references in parentheses refer to this edition.↩︎
Cynthia Ozick, “A Translator’s Monolog,” in Metaphor and Memory, op. cit., p. 201.↩︎
Ibid., p. 201.↩︎
In “A Translator’s Monolog,” Cynthia Ozick writes: “From French to German, from German to Italian, from Italian to Russian, the coherence of a theology, hence of a culture, hence of roles and figures of speech, is transmitted. But the passage from Yiddish to English presupposes a crossing-over of Jewish concepts and Christian concepts, or at best a secularized sensibility.”, Ibid., p. 203.↩︎
Jacob Glatstein, “Nocturnes,” trans. Rachel Ertel, in Po&sie, Paris, Belin, Autumn 1994, no. 71.↩︎
Walter Benjamin, “La tâche du traducteur” (“The Task of the Translator”), in Mythe et violence, trans. Maurice de Gandillac, Paris, Denoël, Dossiers des Lettres Nouvelles, 1971, p. 264.↩︎
Ibid., p. 267.↩︎
Ibid., p. 269.↩︎
Gérard Wajcman, L’interdit (The Forbidden), Paris, Denoël, 1986, pp. 266-267.↩︎
Title of Ansky’s play, better known under the name The Dybbuk.↩︎
Michelle Trân Vàn Khâi, “Le don des mots,” in Poésie en traduction, Cahiers Charles V, Paris, Institut d’Etudes anglophones, Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, Nov. 1994, p. 25.↩︎
Gérard Wajcman, Id. pp. 266-267.↩︎